ROSS’S GAME DUNGEON: CULPA INNATA

The actor I'm reminded of at 7:22 is Spalding Gray--well,  a young Spalding.  Similar eyebrows and smirk...

I got curious and looked for info about Culpa Innata, and what I found is pretty intriguing and I feel I need to share.

1. The novel Culpa Innata is based on is actually two novels ("Kabus"/"The Nightmare" and "Rüya"/"The Dream") that form one work ("Schrodinger's Cat"). They were written by Alev Alatlı in 2000. I think they're only in Turkish, so you'll need to get them translated if you want to read them.

Don't confuse those novels with the official Culpa Innata novelisation written by Burak Barmanbek that released in 2012, though. They're seperate works. That tripped me up before I double-checked what the credits said, so just wanted to clarify so you don't make the same mistake.

2. Culpa Innata's website is still running, and recieved a major overhaul that began in December 2022 and was finally released in August 2023, according to the official Culpa Innata Instagram page. The website is written from an in-universe perspective, and features tons of art, lore, an official wiki, all sorts of stuff.

Their Instagram has similar in-universe art and lore, and they've been posting pretty consistently since December 2023. Their most recent post was three days ago. I'm not sure why; there aren't any links to books or games or anything like that.

Thanks to Jonathan Newman for making the patch and Ross for distributing it. I wish the pop-in wasn't such a huge issue though. No widescreen for me personally, but I appreciate the option.

So, wait, is this based on the same source material as Kabus 22, or are they unrelated? I was thinking how funny it was that Ross has now covered two Turkish adventure(-y) games where the central worldbuilding premise is that most of the world has been united under a shady New World Order.

This game has a lot to digest. The NWO stuff makes enough sense if you're familiar with enough of the conspiracy theory stuff, but the injection of Objectivism does confuse things. People need to be greedy in order to be successful at business and altruism is literally illegal, but also, citizens of the WU should donate to NGOs like not-Greenpeace? Are non-profits like that allowed because running them lets the people in charge gain social capital instead of money? Is the "debt to society" thing less of an actual social obligation and more of a guilt-trip thing to motivate people to make money? Why is the Sage perpetuating this system even though it is kind of bullshit and he's also in charge of the effort to keep the Sun from going red? (And also, if they plan on constructing an insane wormhole, why not just settle for space colonization at that point???)

The fact that the intro clarifies that the existence of the World Union is a period of peace, but also devolution is interesting. Given the fact that the Space Race was labeled as a waste of resources, this all implies that the World Union resulted in something approaching utopia, but at the cost of human stagnation--an idea that I've actually been toying with in some fiction I've been writing piecemeal.

I wonder how much of the weirdness is due to translation weirdness in either direction--this is a Turkish game, and they specifically call out Westernization in the same intro scene.

Ross giving the game the Poe's Law award is extremely apt. Bioshock isn't subtle about it's hatred for libertarian seasteading, but with Culpa Innata, I dunno. It's difficult to tell if it's a critique of objectivism or an ad for it, like the designers either created a sci fi utopia and threw the Randian philosophy into it to make it more questionable, or they designed a society they thought would be objectivist, but didn't really understand what their own philosophy suggested that world would need to look like (a common occurrence).

It reminds me of this drawing:

This is all complicated by the fact that the foundational assumptions of that society are actually a lie because they need it to be that way to keep the sun from dying. Is that the devs saying "this is the proof it would be the best way for humanity to survive", or "this bullshit would only work if it was a lie while the real adults work on solving actual problems"? Either way, I think the game should have gone harder on the propaganda and consumerism angles.

@RocketDude (Quotes aren't working for me so I have to tag)

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So, wait, is this based on the same source material as Kabus 22, or are they unrelated?

It's possible that they are. According to the creator of the game, Culpa Innata is based on Alev Alatlı's "Schrodinger's Cat" books, of which there are two; "Kabus" and "Rüya" (nightmare and dream respectively).

I looked around but can't find any explicit influences cited for Kabus 22 (other than Resident Evil obviously), but given the name and the vaguely similar premises I'd say it's reasonably likely.

Interesting that the game references the Encyclopaedia Galactica; that is mentioned in The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but that was just making fun of it; the Encyclopaedia originally appeared as a serious concept in Isaac Asimov's Foundation saga (the original Hitch-hiker's Guide radio series was made in the same BBC studio in which the first three Foundation books had been serialised a few years earlier, so I think it's pretty likely it was originally conceived as a parody of it).  If the creators of this game are fans of Foundation, it strikes me as unlikely that they'd be especially keen on hyper-individualist philosophies like "Objectivism;" at the heart of the Foundation saga is a concept called "psychohistory," which is all about predicting the complex interplay of different social forces and movements on a vast scale.  In this model of human behaviour, individuals - even incredibly rich, intelligent or powerful ones - have literally no relevance to history whatsoever, other than at certain special and rare once-a-generation-or-so key moments called Seldon Crises when everything comes to a head and somebody finds themselves in a position to make a key decision that will set history on one particular path; otherwise only very large scale collective action over very long periods can have any influence on humanity's destiny.  I can't help but suspect that sincere Objectivists would despise such a notion, and any works associated with it.

If Ross hasn't read those books, I would highly recommend them, they do a lot of that charting-the-trajectory-of-human-civilisation thing he mentions liking so much in Deus Ex and this game.  I would suggest not wasting any time on the recent Apple TV series of the same name, however; it barely resembles the books at all, and seems to have been written by someone who a) didn't really get the point, and b) clearly wanted to write something else of their own anyway.

@Ren_DOTA Hi, author of the patch here... I knew there was some pop-in, but have to admit I haven't played through the whole game with my own patch. So I underestimated the amount of peripheral character headlessness that would show up! Sorry about that 

I did try to change the game's frustum culling, which would have fixed it, but had no luck at the time. I've had some more practice with reverse engineering since then, so might be able to try again at some point.

(Just in case anyone wants grain removal without a widescreen hack, that should work fine if you choose a 4:3 res in dgvoodoo2. The patch will use the right ratio for your dgvoodoo2 resolution setting, it's not hardcoded to 16:9)

Well Ross found another Turkish game. I certainly didn't expect two Turkish games in one year. Anyway I might dig up some Turkish game magazine archives again when I have some spare time. Although I'm not sure I'll find anything as crazy or fascinating that was the development of Kabus 22.

Over time I think I've concluded that my favorite Game Dungeon episodes are the ones trying to follow the plots of low-mid-budget, usually foreign, high concept sci-fi/fantasy games (usually either adventure games or third-person action) with weird worlds and more *vision* than production value. Trying to peel apart the developers' minds based on it.

Cool game and episode! The turks seem to have some interesting game-designers. I really like your critical and open approach to these games and the ideas in them. As DDD said, there is ambiguity here, maybe some insecurity about how to interpret and judge things like this is a good way to keep us on our toes and thinking, instead of getting fed talking points that we are simply supposed to repeat. Keep it up!

On the topic of altruism I really like Ivan Illich's take, summarized in "the corruption of the best is the worst", which I believe points to the folly of institutionalized virtue such as the one portrayed in Lord Blackthorn's Britannia in Ultima V - Warriors of Destiny. Giving to someone because your heart feels for him is one of the best thing syou can do in this life. But being forced to give to someone because some institution or someone else orders you to perverts this, basically amounts to theft and surely does not foster true morality.

On Ayn Rand: (I have never read her of course, but I know that she is despised by people who, like me, have only heard some quotes of hers, of course taken out of context. Still, some may fit the globalized society this game, or even our own..)

On February 2, 1905, American philosopher and writer (Russian-born) Alissa Zinovievna, better known in the literary world as Ayn Rand, was born in St. Petersburg, died in March 1982 in New York.

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases while the citizens may act only by permission, which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history - the stage of rule by brute force."
 

"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion- When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing- when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors- when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

Ok, giving a kid a candy covered in playdoh to go foward in a investigation does remind me of something... I would say she's probably related to a certain Scotland Yard detective who was investigating some druids or something...

And here's an interesting comment I found on the Youtube's comment section that could be interesting for a follow-up episode:

Maybe the "war" they were talking about at the end of the game was against an imminent rebel attack, and maybe the fashion consulant dropping those truth bombs could be something that was kept from the source material. But that's just a theory of mine since I didn't read them.